Election Day brought a big blue earthquake of anti-Trump sentiment that rumbled as far inland as Kansas and shook GOP ground in the Carolinas and Texas. By the time late victories rolled in on Tuesday night, there had been so many wins that subsequent Democratic pickups had begun to feel more like aftershocks, even in states that haven’t voted blue since Bill Clinton was in the White House.

Florida narrowly missed the quake, with Republicans winning all the major statewide races by the thinnest of margins. The one-time quintessential purple state, a so-goes-the-nation bellwether with a relatively even amount of registered Republicans and Democrats, turned remarkably red in the Trump era following Barack Obama’s back-to-back wins in 2008 and 2012. The state legislature redrew its maps to enshrine a supermajority, and a post-Covid influx of GOP transplants seeking lower taxes and lax regulations shifted the balance significantly. A Democrat hasn’t made a fight of the governor’s race this decade, and no Democratic Senate candidate has come close to winning since Bill Nelson lost his reelection bid in 2018.

Angie Nixon felt different. The Jacksonville organizer and bookstore owner ran a proudly democratic socialist campaign, advocating for universal healthcare in a state beset by multiple insurance crises and affordability issues. Her polls looked good up to Election Day, and on Tuesday night, victories across the country made her race in the Sunshine State look winnable. Ultimately though, Nixon could not replicate the victories of other rabble-rousers like Dr. Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan and James Talarico in Texas. She lost to incumbent Ashley Moody, who was appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis to fill the seat left vacant by Marco Rubio’s confirmation as secretary of state, by less than two percentage points. Moody outspent Nixon by more than double to barely eke out a majority. 

The Florida Democratic Party deserves some blame for being woefully behind the times. After a 2019 squeaker between DeSantis and the progressive Andrew Gillum, the party moved as fast as it could from any candidate that might excite its base. They ran a former Republican for governor in each of the last two gubernatorial races, no doubt depressing turnout and enthusiasm among the Democratic base with their moderate picks. 

But a close look at the rest of the Florida races reveals the culprit in Nixon’s narrow loss. Despite a gerrymander meant to calcify Republican supermajorities in the state and a political stiff in the form of David Jolly at the top of the ballot for governor, the GOP lost seats in the state legislature. The energy in Florida and, remarkably, throughout the South, was with anyone running against Republicans. The blame for Nixon’s defeat lies almost solely with national Democrats and their stubborn refusal to back Nixon with either messaging or money. 

Since her shock primary win in August, Nixon has complained about Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee recalcitrance to anyone who will listen. In September, she told MS NOW hosts Symone Sanders Townsend and Eugene Daniels that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was less than thrilled about her race.

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“When I did speak with Sen. Schumer on the phone, it was basically a ‘we will see,’” she said. “He’s going to look into it. That’s what was said, that he’s going to look into it.”

Nixon went on to say that Democrats were wary of throwing in behind a Black woman in the South following Kamala Harris’ 2024 loss: “Folks are a little gun-shy because, unfortunately, Vice President Harris lost as a Black woman, and so people are being very hesitant in terms of funding Black women, especially in the South.”

In later interviews, she claimed that national Democrats wrote off Florida in advance, declining to put money behind her candidacy because they believe the state is “racist.” 

The pale blue dots on Florida’s election map tell the story. The democratic socialist was able to win in Miami-Dade County, despite a Cuban-American population that shudders at anything that sounds like revolution. On the other end of the state, typically Republican Jacksonville swung to the left. An enthusiastic push in the state’s timidly liberal cities could have narrowed the gap in favor of Nixon and added tens of thousands of votes to her final total. According to analysis by Wesleyan Media Project, the national party and affiliated PACs spent 10 advertising dollars in Iowa for every one they spent in Florida in the race’s final weeks, and it showed. The Hawkeye State now has a new Democratic governor-elect and senator-elect.

It was the same story throughout the South. Democrats overperformed in states where the national party bothered to fight. Blue Texas became a reality because of seemingly unlimited spending — it was the most expensive Senate race in history — and national messaging hits on behalf of Talarico. Louisiana and Mississippi offered two incredibly close Senate races in states long assumed to be GOP strongholds. In Louisiana, Democrat Jamie Davis lost to Republican Julia Letlow by only two points. As New York Times contributing opinion writer Steven Rattner pointed out, Davis kept the race close despite receiving zero advertising dollars from the national party in October, per the WMP’s analysis.

Mississippi, though, could turn out to be a miracle — in spite of the DSCC. With 96% of precincts reporting, Democrat Scott Colom, a district attorney, leads the incumbent Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith by only 138 votes, with around 15,000 provisional ballots outstanding.

Speaking to Anderson Cooper on Wednesday, Mississippi state Rep. Cheikh Taylor, a Democrat, blamed the nail-biter on a lack of investment from the national party.

“Early money always helps. Monies have come to the state of Mississippi, just not through the traditional means, though the DNC. We all know that the Colom campaign was locked out of that $30 million contribution to U.S. Senate races,” he said. “Even though the money didn’t come, in Mississippi, we figure it out.”

Don’t get me wrong. Colom, Davis and Nixon all deserve praise for their stunning performances, even if at least two of them came up short. Tuesday night’s news offered a rare glimmer of hope in a bleak few years, but Democrats had a chance to permanently rebuke MAGA — and instead they squandered it based on their own misconceptions about the South.

Grabbing two more close races via some well-placed funding for the party’s nominees would have left them in a much better position to harry and harass the president and block his MAGA agenda over the next two years. All it would have taken was not capitulating in advance.

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Dr. Annie Andrews will be the first Democratic senator from South Carolina since 1998, according to AP projections. In a stunning upset, she defeated the incumbent Republican Darline Graham, who was hand-picked by Donald Trump to succeed her brother, Sen. Lindsey Graham, following his death in July. 

A pediatrician, Andrews positioned herself as an antidote to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s MAHA agenda. Her campaign launch video hinged on measles outbreaks and the harm of anti-vax sentiments at the highest levels of public health. She described Kennedy as the “brain worm guy” and slammed Trump’s Cabinet as uniquely unsuited to their positions. 

The race was never supposed to be close. South Carolina is about as red as you can imagine. The haven of cheap gas and fireworks hasn’t elected any Democrat to statewide office since 2006. Trump carried the state by 17 points in 2024.

Unlike her sibling, who shifted from staunch Trump critic to late-in-life ally, Graham was joined at the hip to the Trump administration from the outset. The president’s high disapproval ratings worked to turn the typical GOP lay-up into a closely contested race. 

But Graham, a novice politician, did herself no favors. She flubbed softball questions around foreign affairs on the debate stage, a strong suit of her hawkish brother. Her dismal poll numbers pushed Trump to rally for Graham repeatedly in the state, cementing even stronger associations between the Republican nominee and Trump’s unpopular policies. 

High early turnout among Black voters in the state also spelled trouble for Graham. The community, which is largely Democratic, turned out in high relative numbers and helped swing the race toward Andrews. 

The Democratic candidate worked to avoid the associations with national party leaders that hamstrung Graham, refraining from appearances with prominent Democrats in the race’s final weeks. Andrews painted herself as a pragmatist, willing to work with national Republicans to score wins for South Carolinians. Late last month, Andrews received a shocking bipartisan endorsement from two former governors of South Carolina. Republican David Beasley joined Democrat Jim Hodges to support Andrews over Trump-backed Graham, saying Andrews was the only candidate focused on “making things better.”

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Sen. Jon Ossoff easily defeated a challenge from Republican Rep. Mike Collins to hold on to his Georgia Senate seat on Tuesday, according to AP projections.

After Donald Trump carried the state in 2024, early forecasts predicted tough sledding for Ossoff. But during a brutal government shutdown — the longest on record — the senator signaled he was willing to stake his candidacy on protecting Affordable Care Act subsidies, and he proved an adept campaigner who was hyper-focused on Georgia issues. Ossoff focused his stump speeches around affordability, skyrocketing inflation and foreign entanglements, hammering Trump for his costly war with Iran.  

For his part, Collins’ candidacy was hamstrung by controversies involving his payroll and affiliation with alleged white nationalists.

Frequently floated as a 2028 contender, Ossoff adopted a fighter’s stance at his campaign events. Like feisty Michigan candidate Abdul El-Sayed, the senator took every opportunity to land a jab against Republicans, occasionally causing some monocle-popping among centrist commentators still holding on to the idea of the dignity of the presidential office. In August, he drew jeers and applause for making light of the rumors surrounding Trump aide Natalie Harp.

“So [Trump] doesn’t want to do this job,” Ossoff said . “He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the Emir of Qatar.”

Ossoff, for his part, has said he has “zero interest in running for president.” His victory speech, which will come later tonight, will be studied by pundits seeking to divine his intentions.

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Move over, Haley Stevens: There’s a new competitor for the most pathetic reaction to plummeting political fortunes. Elon Musk, the former Trump administration member and the world’s richest man, has seen the midterm election forecast for conservative candidates, and he’s responded by petulantly playing with his toys.

The X owner started “Anakin-posting” on Monday. The purely online phenomenon finds far-right and MAGA nerds recasting Star Wars’ Anakin Skywalker, the man who will become Darth Vader, as a tragic hero and paragon of traditional values. A typical post uses generative AI to reframe the “Star Wars” films’ genocidal space monk as a masculine, hyper-conservative, attentive father. Musk’s post shows Anakin, as played by actor Hayden Christensen, sitting on a throne surrounded by his children, Luke and Leia, and his wife, Padme. The AI illustration has pulled liberally from all three trilogies, placing the adult faces of Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher on the children. Natalie Portman’s Padme appears to be wearing her makeup and crown from “Black Swan.” The Sith first family is surrounded by 1970s-era storm troopers and 2010s imperial guards.  

“This is what they stole from us,” Musk captioned the computer-generated photo of his sci-fi fan fiction.

For the unfamiliar, Anakin was a member of an order of space knights. As a young man, he began having prophetic dreams of his wife dying in childbirth. Consumed by ambition and anger, and desperate to avoid the fate he envisioned, he was manipulated by several elderly politicians into betraying his chivalric order, killing many of his fellow knights and slaughtering an entire school full of squires for fear of retribution. Unable to save his wife, and grievously injured from a battle with his former mentor, he became a running dog of a fascist empire that aimed to rule the entire galaxy. 

Right-wing young men have warped that story through the established MAGA lens of “returning to tradition,” picturing a world where having the conviction to kill a bunch of toddlers is celebrated. 

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The typical example of “Anakin-posting” expresses rage at a stagnant economy or lack of prospects by sharing images of Christensen’s Anakin looking stoic. MAGA influencers like Jack Posobiec have added a dash of intergalactic racism, sharing images of a young Anakin surrounded by literal aliens to hint at a pro-segregationist message. Others have reimagined Anakin’s mentors as chiding liberal scolds, grafting pink hair and a keffiyeh onto Obi-Wan Kenobi. In the pathetic galaxy of Gen Z men, anything from mid-century magazine ads to a Disney-owned sci-fi epic for children can be a stand in for their cultural grievances. 

Enough time has passed between the prequels and the present that Anakin can be presented as a brooding badass. The primary criticism of the movies at the time concerned Christensen’s portrayal of Anakin as a whiny child throwing a deadly tantrum. The knotty and boring political intrigue subplots of the films have been forgotten, making it easy to gloss over Anakin being a stooge for politicians playing a game beyond his ken.

Musk, in particular, does have reasons to empathize with the “Star Wars” villain. After believing he had found a way to reshape the government toward his own ends via DOGE, he was booted when the program proved deeply unpopular. Seeing visions of a blue wave washout, he used his financial superpower to try and avoid what appears to be an oncoming loss. Separated from the levers of power and now half a billion dollars poorer, Musk has been forced to play-act a scenario where he won. His image-generating toy gave him the happy ending that politics, relationships and wealth couldn’t.

But all the AI bots can’t undo the facts of Anakin’s story. He was ultimately killed by the evil emperor he served, dying in front of the son he abandoned. His “return to tradition” was a last-minute awakening, when he was forced to confront all the harm he had done and the miserable life he had led. Now there’s something for Musk to aspire to. 

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I had this fantasy as a kid that started with me giving an impressive performance on “Wheel of Fortune.” I’d smoke the other contestants under the watchful eye of a suitably wowed Pat Sajak, crucially solving the prize puzzle and winning the grand prize of seemingly every game show: a vacation package built around “a trip to sunny Florida.”

I’d ride the free plane ticket home and spend a few days with my family in Orlando, just a few hours away from where we actually lived, on a vacation that for once wasn’t spent in relatives’ living rooms. We’d hang out in the Goldilocks Zone, far enough away from home to avoid nagging responsibilities but close enough to sell to my overworked parents. Home was not far away when we needed to return, but why not take a few days off to lounge by the pool?

I never shared that half-baked dream with anyone, especially not with any Latin American authoritarians, but my strategy for stealing some time for poolside lounging seems to be the preferred second act for failed right-wing leaders from Central and South America. When defeated presidential candidate Flávio Bolsonaro fled Brazil for Miami earlier this week, he was taking part in a long tradition of conservative losers hopping a jet to the land of gun shows and foam parties. 

Thanks to its proximity to the Caribbean and South America, its significant immigrant population and Miami International Airport’s status as a hub for flights to and from points south, many a deposed leader has followed a route familiar to Super Bowl champions and snowbirds. When the rabble in the street gets too close to the presidential palace for comfort, they keep half an eye on Florida real estate, much like Northeast Corridor retirees. 

It isn’t surprising that the first notable leader to make the leap in modern memory came from Cuba, an island you can reach from Florida with a suitably kitted-out lawn chair. Facing the collapse of his government amid anti-democratic crackdowns and widespread labor unrest, Cuban President Gerardo Machado hightailed it to Florida in 1933. He would die in Miami just six years later. 

Cuban military dictator Fulgencio Batista spent the next several decades seemingly readying himself to follow Machado to the Sunshine State if and when he needed to make a quick exit. In fact, Batista purchased a home in Daytona Beach and lived there for several years following his initial ouster in the mid-1940s. He returned to power via a military coup in 1952, which in some ways lit the spark for Fidel Castro’s toppling of the Cuban government at the end of the decade. Forced out for the last time, Batista flew to Jacksonville and unsuccessfully requested asylum in the U.S. (He’d have done a lot better under our current president, no doubt.) He wound up fleeing to Spain, then in the grip of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship, and spent the rest of his life in Iberian exile.

Anastasio Somoza was similarly denied safe harbor in the U.S. in 1979, after fleeing Nicaragua in a cargo plane headed for Miami. President Jimmy Carter declined to play host to the last member of a family dynasty that had ruled Nicaragua for 40 years. Somoza made it to Miami as his regime collapsed during the Sandinista revolution, then moved on to the Bahamas and ultimately to Paraguay, then under the rule of military dictator Alfredo Stroessner. It was no safe refuge: He was assassinated there by a Sandinista strike team just a year later.

The pitter-patter of Florsheim-shod feet heading for the Northern Caribbean hasn’t slowed in the 2000s. Deposed dictators, embezzlers and dissent-crushers have flooded into South Florida like the regular king tides. The Miami New Times published a morbid map of the stars in 2010, pointing out the addresses of various subtropical Mussolinis and disgraced generals and boasting that Miami makes “Casablanca look like a Daffy Duck cartoon.”

Former Bolivian President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada ran to South Florida following revolts over his plans to export Bolivian natural gas to the U.S.. Notoriously corrupt Panamanian President Ricardo Martinelli scarpered in similar fashion, though he was ultimately arrested by U.S. authorities in 2017 and sent back to serve a prison term.

With our own fash-flavored president making his official residence in Palm Beach, and his kids nearby in Jupiter, his Brazilian buddies were obvious candidates for taking their talents to South Beach. Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro left for the southernmost red state after his defeat in the 2022 election, though he’s now back in Brazil serving a lengthy prison sentence on house arrest. His son Eduardo, also a former Brazilian elected official, landed Florida around the same time, but has now moved to Texas. Flávio Bolsonaro’s whereabouts since he deplaned at Opa Locka Executive Airport a few days ago are not entirely clear.  

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Florida has long had a significant right-wing Latin American population, thanks in large part to the many Cuban refugees who fled there in the wake of Castro’s 1959 revolution. And for the Bolsonaros, Florida is likely to feel more like home than anywhere else in the Northern Hemisphere. The state is home to more than a fifth of the Brazilian population in the U.S.

Though Flávio Bolsonaro initially boasted of being Brazil’s rightful president after landing in Florida, he seems to have ditched that line subsequently. Recent events have proven that we can never count out Brazil’s first family of fascism, but it isn’t likely they can use Florida as a base of operation for launching a reactionary coup. Outside of Batista’s complicated story, which didn’t end well for him, history has not been kind to those who hope to use an enforced vacation in the House of Mouse as a path back to the presidential palace. 

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Depending on who you talk to, Elvis Presley was either the king of rock ‘n’ roll or a no-good thief.

The legendary singer’s legacy has gone through about as many re-evaluations as Presley himself had jumpsuits. His long-held status as an originator of rock music was obviously not quite the whole story. A minute of research, or just an honest accounting that nearly all his early rockabilly hits were cover songs, puts the lie to the idea that Elvis was a drawling bolt from the blue.  

He took the genre to new heights of popularity, with a hip-swinging style and a (white) babyface, but the music that Elvis sold so well predated him by decades. The prehistory of rock ‘n’ roll  is full of names who might have become stars if they were gifted with his baby blues or discovered by a relentless schemer on the level Col. Tom Parker. 

Then, as something of a corrective to the idea that Elvis was the end-all, be-all of early rock music, the revisionist idea that he was nothing more than a Pat Boone-type, a watered-down middling talent whose success only came on the backs of better Black originators took hold in the sort of circles that like to argue about music history. That was, of course, just as false. Presley was a remarkable performer with a magnificent voice and an ear for hits. His reliance on songwriters was not unusual for its time, with the idea of performers also being their own primary songwriters only arising by way of the rock bands like the Beatles who emerged in Elvis’ wake. 

That conception of Elvis has also faded in recent years, in no small part thanks to Baz Luhrmann’s glitzy, campy 2022 biopic. But you could forgive some people for rolling their eyes when they saw the news that the companies that own the rights to Presley’s music and likeness were suing Anthropic, accusing the AI company’s chatbots of lifting scraping hundreds of Elvis’ songs  in service of creating AI-generated pseudo-music. How could the owners of this catalog, of all people, object to well-funded operations cranking out simulations?

The lawsuit, filed earlier this month in a San Francisco federal court, accuses Anthropic of engaging in “copyright infringement at a scale never seen before.” The owners of Elvis’ catalog claim that Anthropic used their songs as training data without permission or payment. They make the point that Presley’s music isn’t unique in this regard, alleging that Anthropic has done pretty much the same thing with all manner of recorded music, in blatant defiance of copyright law. Anthropic software could never have created songs that sound so similar to Presley’s out of whole cloth, the plaintiffs say, and instead relied on ill-gotten data.

“Anthropic has essentially put to the test the adage of whether monkeys and typewriters could, provided enough time, recreate Hamlet,” the lawsuit states. “Anthropic found a workaround. Rather than training its monkeys (the AI models) from first principles, Anthropic found mimicry (i.e. copyright infringement) to be the much easier pursuit.”

The plaintiffs say they tested Claude, asking it to crank out modern updates to Presley hits. The results were “very close to the originals: same structure, same hooks reused with light rewording, and full sets of verses/choruses/bridges.”

“That’s edging past ‘inspired by’ into reproducing the copyrighted song, even when the words are swapped out,” they wrote. 

The proprietors of Presley’s material are demanding more than $41 million in damages. Anthropic has denied any wrongdoing.

“We disagree with the claims and intend to defend this case fully,” Anthropic said in a statement.

Given the AI industry’s hostility toward intellectual property rights, it’s not a stretch to imagine that a major player may have trained its models on some of the most famous songs in recorded music history. It’s also not hard to imagine the estates of Big Mama Thornton and Arthur Crudup — should any such entities exist — scoffing at those headlines.

But even if we concede that Elvis was elevated to stardom in large part because  a racist public was unwilling to buy the same songs from Black artists, and even if we picture the late king as a conniving tyrant extracting unconscionable wealth from an underclass of geniuses who remained unrecognized, the rights holders are right to cry foul. That’s because stealing, begging or borrowing material in service of an artistic creation made by real people is enormously different from some corporation doing it to build a better Mechanical Turk. 

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Presley was a lot of things: a hick from Tupelo who loved R&B and gospel in equal measure, a white performer of Black music who undoubtedly benefited from the segregated pop charts, a tragic figure whose opioid addiction and poor health led to an early death. But he was also a man, flesh and blood. Anything he could create by virtue of his expelling air through his vocal chords carries more intrinsic value than a billion Claude prompts (which is doubly true true once you know that all of these AI companies operate at a loss).  If you need convincing, just look at his 1977 performance of “Unchained Melody.” 

The song itself is no great feat. Its creation was a purely commercial affair, written for the soundtrack of a ‘50s prison movie that no one remembers. A weepy ballad about longing for a lost love while behind bars, it had been recorded many times over by the time an ailing Elvis brought it out during a concert in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Overweight and profusely sweating, the visibly failing superstar belts the Righteous Brothers’ version of the song while seated at the piano, with a band member holding the microphone. Barely two months before his death, Presley gives everything he’s got left to the song’s central question: “Are you still mine?” 

Even from this distance, nearly a half-century later, it’s still capable of raising the hair on your arms. That moment, a brief section of a borrowed song from a washed-up and dying man, carries more weight than even the most faithful AI recreation or iteration. That moment is exactly why rights holders have a duty to push back against any attempts for AI companies to pretend their chatbots are included in the old chestnut that “great artists steal.”

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Donald Trump is bad at a lot of things — negotiations, concealing criminal behavior, standing normal — but he’s not bad at everything. As much as it might bug some of us to admit it, there are a few areas where the president excels. He has an incredible gift for crafting earworms, and his Queens cadence and variable-volume delivery has wriggled its way into American speech patterns. He’s skilled at crafting funny putdowns, pithy nicknames and jabs that hit what his rival politicians are sensitive about and exploit the pressure points of expensive, futile campaigns.   

But Trump’s greatest skill is his ability to sniff out a loser. The son of a slumlord coming from the outer boroughs, he was starting with two strikes against him when he attempted to make a jump into Manhattan’s high society. If he wanted to join the rarefied air of the sons and daughters of The 400, he couldn’t be seen associated with anyone who would count as a mark against his judgment. Trump developed a sharp sense of who was on the wane and on the rise, and he worked hard to only mingle with the ascendant. 

It worked. His surname became synonymous with big-money deals, success and opulence despite a string of bankruptcies, casino closures and failed direct-to-consumer businesses. Trump kept away from maiden horses, in part because he ate dirt so often. So you can trust that when he calls Bill Maher a “complete and total loser,” he knows what he’s talking about. 

Trump railed against the host of HBO’s “Real Time” on Sunday night in a Truth Social post that expanded beyond essay length. He bashed Maher for his ratings and accused the host of lying about Trump’s approval rating. He pushed back against Maher’s criticism of the war in Iran. Most cuttingly, the reality TV veteran accused Maher of leaning heavily on canned applause and a laugh track to sell the idea that he’s funny.

“[Maher] lies about everything,” the president wrote, “and I believe he lied to me when I asked him, with all the applause and laughter he gets after almost everything he says, about things that aren’t funny or even any good, what Laughter Machine does he use?”

Maher prodded Trump in a monologue last Friday after attending a White House dinner alongside Kid Rock and ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith. The host made a note of Trump’s plummeting approval ratings and recent commentary on men’s physiques at his rallies. “It’s just a little odd that Trump keeps gushing about men’s bodies, and how handsome they are, and their jawlines, and their asses, their physiques,” Maher said. “I’m a little hurt. I was there for dinner for four hours last week, and not a peep. Nothing.”

On Truth Social, Trump accused Maher of turning up looking bedraggled and drunk for the controversial dinner at the “seductive and beautiful” White House. The president said that he “learned nothing” from Maher, but he clearly hoped the host would leave with a more favorable outlook on the MAGA movement. Afterward, Trump said Maher returned to his set and his “laughing machine” and offered slightly tamer critiques in the days that followed, before the host supposedly turned on him for the cameras.

“He reverted back to his former self, and his old ways,” Trump wrote. “What he spouts isn’t what he believes. He has to cater to his base, which is mostly composed of Losers, and people who don’t like working.” 

In true Trump fashion, the post was lengthy and melodramatic. But at the heart of his burn-book slams, he did hit on a real question: Who is Bill Maher for? 

The snarky libertarian has the carriage of an overeducated yuppie. Despite his frequent protestations, his smarm and suits pushed him to one side of the country’s rigid two-party binary. (He didn’t name his first show “Politically Incorrect” to rile the GOP, after all.) Maher’s outrage over the War on Terror and 2002 cancellation by ABC jammed him into an awkwardly fitting box of “liberal cause celebre.” As neoconservatives pushed an uberpatriotic theocracy in the aughts, his bad faith documentaries, which were aimed at evangelicals, kept up the illusion that he was on the side of progressives. But Maher has never been a lefty, or even particularly committed to any beliefs beyond his freedom to smoke weed.

In recent years, he’s crowed to anyone still listening that he’s open to MAGA’s overtures. He’s frequently come out on the side of reactionaries when the question centers around gender nonconforming people or Islamophobia. Outside of his dinner at the White House, Maher has railed against progressive candidates and offered his vote to Republicans, provided they tone down their rhetoric around the Big Lie. 

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That particular problem is unsolvable, at least as long as Trump is alive and in power. While the president’s popularity might be waning with voters, he still has the ability to sink Republicans who cross him. That leaves Maher in an unenviable position, inching toward a conservative party that could take or leave him. He’s gotten crankier and more prone to cribbing Fox News talking points at a time where the center of the Democratic Party is rushing to the left. His constant trashing of rising progressive stars will be hard to forget if the expected blue wave materializes in the Nov. 3 midterms. 

All this means that the proud libertarian has found himself with fewer friends than ever. Cozying up to Trump only got him publicly mocked by the president as a “hopeless guy” and a “coward.” The liberal commentariat reacted negatively to Maher’s first dinner with Trump in 2025, with Keith Olbermann claiming that the comedian had always been a “shameless opportunist.” This year, Michigan’s Democratic Senate nominee Dr. Abdul El-Sayed called out Maher’s history of religious intolerance.

With Trump realizing that Maher’s not worth the effort to woo and the next generation of party stars outright hostile to him, it’s unclear what role Maher has to play. “Aren’t these flyover states stupid?” isn’t enough of a stance to warrant having the mic when the current administration is disappearing people off the street. Maher’s punch-left, pat-right comedy has been stale for years, but he’s still insisting he’s owed a platform. He’s a blunt comic whose rotation of tired jokes have left him with no one to pass his joint to. 

Perhaps Trump summed up the problem of Maher best, in a barb buried deep in his Sunday night tirade. Maher clearly views himself as a bold truth-teller, willing to take on both the empty-headed conservatives and the too woke progressives. Trump’s approval-obsessed brain looks at a guy who has alienated anyone who might support him and only sees one thing: “You’re not transformative,” he said. “You’re a loser!”

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There’s this old joke about a guy’s first day in hell. He’s being given the orientation: Here’s where we keep the pitchforks. Here’s where we make the printers. Then the time comes to pick his eternal punishment. The first room is fire and brimstone, eternal agony. “That’s not for me,” the man says. The second is full of people being eaten by animals. “Pass,” he says. In the third room, he finds people sipping coffee while waist deep in excrement. “I think I can handle that,” he says. The door closes behind him as a demon yells, “Coffee break’s over! Back on your heads!”

I’m not naive enough to think that Jesse Walters came to Fox News during a proverbial break in their typical wallowing. He came on as a production assistant to former host Bill O’Reilly during the boom years of George W. Bush’s first term. Watters made a name as an liberal-needler, confronting progressive targets in the halls of congressional office buildings and peppering them with bad faith questions, and he’s since parlayed his willingness to be irritating into a decades-long career. Now nearing 50, there are signs that Watters is tiring of playing the enfant terrible, that he’s over standing on his head and then coming up to flash the requisite grin. 

Take, for example, his subtle distancing from Mike Rogers and Ken Paxton, the Republican Senate nominees from Michigan and Texas. On his afternoon panel show “The Five” earlier this month, Watters refused to wholeheartedly join in on bashing James Talarico, Paxton’s Democratic opponent in the Lone Star State. While his co-hosts jeered at Talarico for being weak — and possibly even vegan — Watters admitted that Paxton’s past fraud allegations and general demeanor marked him as a bit of a creep. 

“[Talarico is] running against Paxton, and Paxton has a lazy eye and this whiff of corruption around him,” Watters said. “There’s just something off-putting about him.” 

Likewise, while covering the Michigan Senate race, Watters has been remarkably friendly toward the Democratic nominee, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed. While the progressive rabble-rouser represents the exact opposite of nearly everything Fox News stands for, he still seems to pass the “would like to have a beer with him” test. After a contentious interview with the candidate on Aug. 25, Watters admitted that El-Sayed was “not your typical stiff,” even though he thought his policy goals were the work of a “lunatic.” 

“I actually like Abdul,” Watters said. “I probably shouldn’t like him, but I do.”

It’s not the first time that Watters has been slightly out-of-step with his network. Attorney General Todd Blanche dropped by “Jesse Watters Primetime” on his first day on the job, almost certainly expecting a friendly interview. Watters grilled Blanche about the Justice Department’s handling of the Epstein files and accused him of not understanding why Americans felt stiffed by their slow-walked release. 

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Lately, Watters has been openly grousing about Fox News’ coverage of the upcoming midterms. The polling does not look good for Republicans, with reliable states like Texas and Alaska seemingly turning into coin tosses. While the Senate projections are narrower, most prognosticators expect Democrats to take back the House and narrowly win the upper chamber. Watters noted that the only path to avoid a congressional bloodbath for Republicans was amping up the “fear porn.”

“You have to say, ‘These people are going to take your healthcare, they’re going to let in the Third World, they’re going to jack up your taxes,’ and that’s what’s going to get people to come out to vote,” he said on Oct. 15. “You have to say, these people are scary and dangerous.”

But Watters seems to be growing weary of flimsy culture war fights. Earlier this week, the host rejected a planned segment on the WNBA and the trans panic surrounding the league — in which no trans athletes play — that his network has played an integral role in fostering.

“I hate the story,” he said on “The Five.” “I hate the WNBA. I don’t watch it. No one watches it. The only time we talk about it is like, they fouled the white star too hard or someone wore a t-shirt . . . I don’t want to push this story anymore! I want to leave this story alone! I am no longer talking about the WNBA. As of now, I boycott this segment.” 

Watters has seen the polling. In his “fear porn” hot tip, he noted that the MAGA base will come out and vote, but that the rest of the GOP coalition is unmotivated. In fleeing from the talking points of a Trump administration gloating over an unpopular war, Watters appears to be distancing himself from election results that are, at best, likely to be deeply embarrassing.

Watters has weathered enough sea changes over his decades at Fox News that he can chart the tides. He made the turn from gleeful prankster to established host as the nation soured on Bush’s brand of “aw shucks” neoconservatism. He held on through Trump’s various impeachments and election losses thanks to a winking persona that could quickly drop any talking point that didn’t go over. Now that the coffee break is almost over, that the second Trump administration’s brief period of celebratory cruelty is almost certainly coming to an end, Watters isn’t quite ready to get back on his head. 

His smug presentation won’t jibe with a hamstrung Trump administration, and there’s no room for outsider outrage while their guy is still in the White House. Look for Watters’ shows to get all the more murky and interesting in the back half of Trump’s term. Expect him to run from issues around gender and immigration, especially once the new Congress is in session and hammering Trump daily on kitchen table issues. 

You have to wonder if he’ll lose a bit of the arrogance, if the space between Watters’ segments and the network’s chosen tack will grow even wider. After all, it’s hard to be self-satisfied eating in that third room, and anyway, according to Fox News, that’s supposed to be the Democrats’ job.

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Have you ever read “The Secret?”

The pseudoscientific self-help book by Rhonda Byrne rode a 2006 Oprah Winfrey endorsement to the tune of tens of millions of copies sold. It pushes the “law of attraction,” the idea that the universe is built on positive and negative energies, and that like sticks with like. In short, if you think regularly about the things you want and maintain a positive attitude, those things are more likely to come your way.

That’s the gist, anyway. Honestly, I never read it. But its ubiquity in the aughts, its reputation for being largely composed of quotations and the relative unoriginality of the premise — which adds a bit of woo-woo to the idea that you catch more flies with honey than vinegar — makes it feel like I have. Even if I was completely unaware of the New Thought movement, or if I’d never heard the name Norman Vincent Peale, I’d have some idea of what Byrne was on about. I’ve been a Jay-Z fan for most of my life.

The rapper has been manifesting his second act as a power player for nearly his entire career. Outside of some early, Das Efx-indebted features in the early ‘90s, Shawn Carter has been manifesting moguldom across his discography.

It’s right there on the cover of his 1996 debut “Reasonable Doubt.” The black-and-white photo and early computer-assisted graphic design look chintzy now, especially when held up to the art-directed and museum-curated sheen of his later work. But there’s no mistaking what Jay-Z is going for with his fedora, scarf and cigar. This kid from Brooklyn’s Marcy Projects is no street-level striver. He’s a boss.

It carries into track one, where a middleman is warning some lackey not to cross Carter. The first thing anyone hears about Jay-Z is in reverential tones, fit for a short-tempered kingpin. You get the sense that you might get to meet him someday, if you play your cards right. But for now, he’s out of your reach and your tax bracket. What follows is nearly an hour of opulent sh*t talk, laid over lush soul and jazz samples handpicked by producers with names like DJ Premier. It sounds slick and established. It sounds expensive. Most importantly, it sounds unhurried and in control. This was oligarch rap from the latest king of New York.

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In 1996, Jay-Z was far from the billionaire multihyphenate we know today. He was co-owner of Roc-A-Fella Records, but at that time the label was mostly a means to release his debut after being turned away by several majors. He kept putting out the idea that he was already a magnate to anyone with a Walkman, while still scrabbling behind the scenes.

Case in point: Two platinum records weren’t enough to convince the copyright holders of the musical “Annie” to clear a sample for Jay-Z’s third album. The multi-billionaire of 2026 might have flashed a wad of cash. ‘90s Jay Z (sans hyphen in several ways) wrote a letter.

“I made up this story about how when I was a seventh grader in Bed-Stuy, our teacher held an essay contest, and the three best papers won the writer a trip to the city to see ‘Annie,’” he told Grantland in 2014. “I wrote that from the moment the curtain came up I felt like I understood honey’s story. Of course, I’d never been to see ‘Annie’ on Broadway. But I had seen the movie on TV.”

That album went platinum six times over, but even in the heady pre-Napster era, that wasn’t private yacht money. You wouldn’t know that if you saw the “Big Pimpin’” video, though. Jay-Z kept up the facade of globe-trotting mogul through several more albums, and that fantasy inched closer to reality with each release. He launched a clothing brand. He opened a nightclub. He was still talent, though, calling for the suits to “pay us like you owe us” on his hit “Izzo.” More than a decade later, Jay-Z would make good on the idea that “money talks so talk more bucks” when he launched a streaming service that paid higher royalty rates than its competitors.

On mic, he started referring to himself as the “best rapper alive.” Knowing that hall-of-famers go out with a bit of ceremony and their jersey in the rafters, he announced a short-lived retirement with “The Black Album.” Briefly free from a grueling release schedule, he bought a stake in the NBA’s Nets and pushed them to move to Brooklyn. He became the CEO of Def Jam Records. His mogul dreams made real, Jay returned to rapping with the flair and distant remove of a bored emperor. He was a moneymaker first and foremost, not a businessman but a business, man. He’d spoken it into existence 16 bars at a time.

In that context, it’s not at all surprising that Jay-Z may have hand-selected himself to headline next year’s Super Bowl halftime show. Puck broke the news that Roc Nation, Jay-Z’s entertainment conglomerate, had tagged the rapper for the championship game. Roc has produced the halftime show for the NFL since 2019, and Jay-Z is currently touring to celebrate the 30th anniversary of his debut album. It would be a natural fit, even without the hitmaker’s behind-the-scenes ties. He’s already a Rock & Roll Hall of Famer. He just wrapped up the release of an eight-part docuseries with producer/guru Rick Rubin on HBO Max.

Pressed on the leaks, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell took on the tone of intelligence services, refusing to confirm or deny the news.

“I am not aware of a leak,” Goodell said in a news conference earlier this week. “I’ve been in the committee meetings. So, I’m not sure it’s a leak. We haven’t announced anything. Until we do, we won’t make any comment on that.”

If it turns out to be true, it’s just the latest example of Jay-Z putting what he wants out into the universe and getting it back. He turned down an offer to perform at the halftime show over a decade ago, telling The New York Times that he did not appreciate the way the league negotiated. Per Jay-Z, the NFL’s offer hung on bringing along Kanye West and Rihanna, who were two-thirds of his 2009 hit “Run This Town.”

“Of course I would have,” Jay-Z said in 2020, “but I said, ‘No, you get me.’ That is not how you go about it, telling someone that they’re going to do the halftime show contingent on who they bring. I said forget it. It was a principle thing.”

Jay-Z got the last laugh. After the 2019 halftime show landed with a thud, he was brought on to produce the event and has helmed it since. Rhonda Byrne told readers that “your thoughts become things.” Jay-Z told us that he would always pick himself. Who does he know fresher than Hov? Riddle him that.

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He might look like something found in the dumpster at a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert. He might shamelessly plunder the sonics of decades of deep-fried and gravy-smothered hits. But despite everything about his presentation and performance, Kid Rock is not actually southern. 

If he were, he might have done the friendly thing and warned Eminem off of collaborating on “Heal My Faith,” a song on his recent Christian album “Halfway 2 Jesus.” He might have stopped his longtime friend and fellow Michigander from irreparable reputational damage. Instead, he let Slim Shady learn a hard lesson that true southerners know: You lay down with dogs, you wake up with fleas. 

“Heal My Faith” is genial to the point of being unmemorable, a bit of cringy Christian pablum that encourages loving someone even when you’re outside of the pit. It’s student-athlete core, a mish-mash of choirs, electric guitar noises over pounding drums that all sound like keyboard presets. Kid Rock’s contributions are entirely lifted from inspirational T-shirts, table scraps from rejected Jelly Roll songs. The result is that “Heal My Faith” offers very little to chew on — until Eminem shows up.

The boilerplate praise chug of the song has one upside: It forces the “Rap God” to slow down. Left to his own devices, middle-aged Eminem has been the hip-hop equivalent to masturbatory guitarists, his late-stage work full of technically impressive displays of chops that nonetheless lack the fun and melody of his radio hits. Hearing him enter the song with a flow that’s not indebted to a J.J. Fad outro offered a glimmer of hope. But it was short-lived.

On “Heal My Faith,” the rapper who first gained mainstream attention by lighting the pop chart’s sacred cows afire wonders why we can’t all just get along. It’s shocking stuff from the rapper who famously mused about dropping an “awfully hot coffee pot” on Donald Trump in a freestyle at the BET Hip Hop Awards in 2017. Now, Slim Shady seems to be saying, “We might believe in fundamentally opposed directions for this country. We might differ on the idea of extending dignity to all people, but can’t we put that aside for the sake of a new single you can buy?” 

You don’t need to hear it. You’ve already heard it. It’s the realm of purple state campaign ads and Earthbound Trading Co. bumper stickers. It’s junk, and Eminem seems to know it.

How else can you explain a verse that is 90% throat-clearing and preemptive dodges of the backlash he knows is coming? Eminem spends bar after bar defending his decision to even appear on the song, touting his decades-long friendship with Kid Rock and their intertwined history in the music industry.

He talks about their shared roots in Detroit’s music scene, and how their paths crossed again and again. He details an early CD release party at length, where the more established Kid Rock showed up to lend support to the emerging rapper. It isn’t until the closing lines of his verse that Eminem turns to God and the brotherhood of man.

“Liberal and evangelical can agree,” he raps. “It’s God first, home of the free.”

Reputation-wise, the collaboration does far more for Kid Rock than it does for Eminem. The former has long been fully consumed by Trump World, becoming more of a standby entertainer for MAGA events than a rock star. Eminem, on the other hand, once told fans who supported Trump to stop streaming his music. 

(Ke.Mazur/WireImage) Kid Rock and Eminem during Experience Music Project Opening Gala at Experience Music Project in Seattle, Washington.

Rock told Billboard that he hadn’t planned to “drag [Eminem] into my political world,” but he had to have known  that was impossible. The nod from a supposed Trump critic removes a small bit of the stain on Kid Rock, but it also transfers directly to his collaborator.

Eminem might have been hoping to build a bridge with this collaboration, but at least according to his Instagram comments, his fans aren’t ready to get over it. One commenter assured him that it’s okay to cut off a friendship “over moral differences.” Another said Eminem’s line in the sand against Trump must have been “brushed back into the beach.” The rapper’s newfound neutrality, one wrote, still amounted to “choosing a side.”

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You can’t feel too bad for Eminem, who’s had plenty of opportunities to see that who you rap with is who you are. After all, more than a year after her breakout single “What I Want,” which she recorded with the controversial country music star Morgan Wallen, the pop singer Tate McRae is still being confronted by fans and interviewers with questions about the pair’s collaboration. 

Wallen, who’s been given about as many second chances as gold records, has never explicitly identified himself as a supporter of the MAGA movement. But his history of using slurs on camera, the general nastiness of his dejected young man music and a massive social media tiff with “Saturday Night Live” have solidified him as an anti-woke warrior in the popular conception. 

“It’s crazy to think that one song could define a whole person,” McRae told W Magazine earlier this month.“There are many aspects of my personality that three-quarters of my audience has no idea about. You hope one day you figure out a way to show all aspects of it.”

There’s little chance that Eminem will face such questions in the future, if only because his career as a hitmaker is basically over. He was something exciting and fresh when he pantsed the pop culture landscape in the late 1990s, but joking about how much everything sucks is a young man’s game. Coming from an older man, it just sounds bitter and out-of-touch. 

Different listeners draw the start of his decline and the end of his relevancy at different points. Most agree that the zeitgeist of rap started to shift away from the stubbornly anachronistic rapper sometime around the end of the aughts. In 2013, he released a well-received album seemingly purpose-built to cap on his career, and then he just kept going. The 23-year-old McRae, on the other hand, will have her past decisions dug up by what remains of the music press after each new chart smash. Eminem may well be staring down a future where his regrettable decision to record contemporary worship dreck with Kid Rock generated his last real headlines. 

It’s something the culturally savvy clown of Eminem’s early career would have been smart enough to avoid. 

The post Eminem’s Kid Rock collab shows the risk of cozying up to MAGA appeared first on Salon.com.

Conservatives have long pitched their project as a return to normalcy, a way to set right a world that’s gone off its axis. In theory, it’s an understandable goal. Who doesn’t react to getting older and more removed from the engine of culture with an initial feeling that the next generation is doing it wrong? 

In practice, the right’s message is more of a respectable veil covering the fact that they want the power to beat up on minorities and buy anything they want. But there’s one arena where the right might actually be bringing back an honest-to-goodness return to tradition: the multiplex.

The lines between television and the movies used to be rather rigid. There were movie stars and there were television actors, and rarely did the twain meet. Actors without matinee idol looks or sufficient draw could make a living as character actors. Faded stars could scrape out a second act in B-movies and lesser studio offerings without losing the prestige of the silver screen. Television actors traded that type of cachet for steady work and wider audiences. A movie star appearing on television was a sign of terminal decline.

The rise of prestige television and streaming shook up the established hierarchy. If television could hit something approaching the same cinematic highs and emotional depths as a Hollywood movie, even if rarely, then the stigma of going episodic couldn’t last. The prestige TV gold rush inspired plenty of marquee stars to jump ship, taking roles from deep-pocketed streamers for niche audiences. (Somebody must be watching Reese Witherspoon and Billy Crudup on Apple TV’s “The Morning Show,” but I can’t say I’ve ever seen them.) The old order and the connotations of each medium had gone post-modern and topsy-turvy. 

Enter Ben Shapiro.

The Daily Wire co-founder and conservative political commentator has made several attempts to break into Hollywood. Over the years, he has repeatedly alluded to a script he wrote as a young man at the behest of the late ABC executive Leonard Goldberg, while his dramedy about a conservative student at Harvard never got off the ground. But that hasn’t deterred Shapiro. He’s used his political commentary outlet as a springboard to produce a series of execrable comedies and thrillers, from 2023’s irredeemable and laughless “Lady Ballers,” which centers on a group of former high school basketball players reuniting to compete in women’s basketball by posing as transgender women, to the semi-competent and bloody hatefest “Run Hide Fight: Infidels.” 

Shapiro’s films haven’t made much of a dent in Hollywood, let alone the wider culture. But that is likely to change with The Daily Wire’s upcoming film “Confession.”

Written by Shapiro, “Confession” follows an academic in Moscow under the rule of Joseph Stalin. He’s brought in for questioning after allegedly conspiring with a dissident priest, only to find that his interrogator is a former student. In less ideological hands, the film could be an interesting examination of loyalty and state overreach. Coming from the man who accused Baron Harkonnen, the villain in the “Dune” science-fiction franchise, of being a communist, we aren’t holding our breath. 

Still, the announcement of “Confession” made a splash, less for its logline than its topline. The cast is chock full of former Oscar nominees and one-time A-listers. The participation of James Franco, Rob Lowe, Brad Dourif and Emile Hirsch make this the most star-studded production Shapiro has ever produced. Beyond the musty Cold War paranoia and production design straight out of the “Command & Conquer: Red Alert” video game, the film is small-c conservative in its appeal to a bygone tradition: giving disgraced actors a mid-budget springboard from which to launch their career revivals. 

Franco was once a megawatt star, but his career faltered shortly after several women accused him of sexual misconduct in 2018. In the late aughts, with a Screen Actors Guild-nominated turn in “Into the Wild,” Hirsch was positioned to be the next big thing. But the belly flop of “Speed Racer” and a 2015 assault of a female Paramount Pictures executive at the Sundance Film Festival put his career on ice. Lowe’s scandal-plagued days are long behind him, but he’d settled into a career as a reliable network television star. Most recently, the star of “The West Wing” has been a mainstay on Fox’s campy disaster series “9-1-1.” “Confession” sees him trying out long atrophied dramatic acting muscles, taking a tentative step into Hollywood. Dourif has never generated any significant controversies to our knowledge, but his appearance is notable because it contradicts his 2024 retirement announcement. 

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Taken with the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it starring turn from Jonathan Majors in “Infidels,” The Daily Wire’s gambit becomes clear. In reaching out to disgraced or out-of-fashion actors, the company is getting notable names for their bargain-basement productions. The actors, in turn, can add a few performances for their sizzle reels that post-date whatever controversy pushed them out of the limelight. 

It’s not a bad deal for either party. From the actors’ perspective, they’re just following the B-list trails blazed by actors like John Travolta and Nicolas Cage, stars who spent decades cranking out direct-to-video duds while seeking the right role to catapult them back into notoriety. What’s new is the ideological bent of a studio like Shapiro’s. Typically, appearing in outwardly conservative fare was the mark of an inwardly conservative star. Think Kirk Cameron’s Christian schlock or Kevin Sorbo’s post-Hercules output. When a name like Jim Caviezel shows up in QAnon-adjacent thrillers, it’s a bit of a “fork found in kitchen” situation.

Shapiro’s comeback machine is something slightly different. Given what we’ve seen from the films he has worked on in the past, the machine is likely to be clunky — but that won’t matter to either party if it works. 

Conservatives’ belief that “cancel culture” has gone too far, that men chastised for behaving badly are really victims of a radical mob run amok, allows them to take on names that are not welcome in Hollywood. If the ploy works, it’s proof that they were right all along — that cooler heads prevailed and the initial controversy was an overreaction. 

With the Daily Wire’s film arm, Shapiro is bringing back the B-list for a cancel culture age, offering dimmed stars the chance to bide their time until the unistudio of Paramount/Warner Bros. comes calling.

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For a sizable chunk of its existence, the United States has been remarkably effective at manufacturing death at scale. In the years since World War II, as steel production slowed and agriculture became one big subsidy, untimely ends became one of the few things you could still expect the U.S. to make itself. 

The business of bomb-dropping boomed through economic downturns and outsourcing pushes. NAFTA and the Great Recession couldn’t put a dent in America’s output of explosive ordinance. The lack of a military draft or a requirement to declare war kicked the death factory into overdrive, with defense budgets growing every year. The death toll in Iraq reached one million in the same year that Lehman Brothers collapsed. As the U.S. economy teetered on the brink, President Barack Obama was sending multi-million dollar drones to strike Yemeni weddings. Outside of a few million protestors that no one felt the need to listen to, most Americans were fine with the whole business, but with one caveat: They didn’t want to see it.

Decades after the televised spectacle of the Vietnam War, after which the Pentagon restricted what media outlets could cover, multiple wars in the Middle East were presented as a bloodless spectacle on cable, with shock-and-awe filmed and broadcast on CNN from a safe remove. In the rare instances where Americans were forced to see the deaths of Iraqi civilians up close — such as the infamous 39-minute “Collateral Murder” footage which was released by Wikileaks in 2010 — it turned public opinion against the wars permanently. That revulsion was one small part of the establishment backlash that put Donald Trump in the White House. 

But something has shifted in the ensuing years. The same president who decried “American carnage” in his first inaugural address has inspired an unusual bloodlust in his MAGA base, offering up real-world violence in lieu of a prosperous economy or lower gas prices. Whenever his public approval ratings have flagged, most notably when voters rejected his 2020 re-election bid, Trump has stoked his base with calls to violence.    

He eventually won that second term four years later, a sign from the universe that there would be no real consequences for reveling in violence. Since then, Trump has shown an extreme lack of care for the brutal — and sometimes deadly — effects of his policies. Worse still, many of his supporters seem to hunger for more bloodshed, celebrating each new instance of a Trump policy ending in death. 

Some of this was to be expected. Americans are remarkably skilled at compartmentalizing the bureaucratic ways U.S. actions lead to deaths globally. When Elon Musk’s inartful Department of Government Efficiency cuts to government funding and the Trump administration’s attacks on the U.S. Agency for International Development started racking up a body count, the mood within the MAGA coalition was more indifferent than celebratory. But Trump and his messengers have a tendency to make everything more crude and less abstract.

That’s why it shouldn’t have come as a surprise when administration officials shared footage of extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean. Where previous administrations were content to project strength around the globe through quasi-legal military actions for a small audience composed of other world leaders, Trump may as well have projected the operation on the side of one of his resorts. 

Given the appetites he has built up among his supporters, it shouldn’t have shocked us to see them cheer the strikes on alleged drug runners. Former conservative fighters against government overreach — the sort who once lamented the deaths of militant separatists like LaVoy Finicum and Vicki Weaver — praised Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents when they killed protesting citizens. Republicans who warned about government tyranny for years celebrated scenes of people being snatched off the street and into unmarked cars. Third-party deportations, intentionally cruel detentions and partnerships with black-box prisons, like the notorious CECOT in El Salvador, created the conditions where deportees will inevitably die. 

The only consistent thread in these examples is a desire to see people they don’t like get hurt or killed.

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But it’s not enough for the MAGA movement to witness death in the real world. The growing conservative media market is filled with examples of people — mostly non-white or non-Christian — meeting grisly ends. “Citizen: Vigilante,” a film starring Armie Hammer that was boosted by Elon Musk,  follows a landlord who kills his way through an unnamed European city after migrants attack a young girl. The Daily Wire’s bloody “Run Hide Fight: Infidels” is set on the campus of a similarly anonymous liberal arts college, and it luxuriates in bloodlust. Blue-haired liberals get their throats slashed while gay men are thrown from buildings.

In that context, Pete Hegseth’s recent call for a public execution is hardly strange. The defense secretary floated the idea of broadcasting the death by firing squad of Nidal Hasan, a former major in the Army, who was convicted in 2013 of killing 13 people in a mass shooting at Fort Hood, Texas, four years before. In his court-martial proceedings, Hasan said he carried out the attack in response to U.S. killings in Afghanistan. He is scheduled to be executed on Dec. 3. 

“We’ll make sure that people are able to . . . watch it, that it’s public,” Hegseth told Real America’s Voice, “because people need to understand that … there’s serious consequences for these types of things.”

Hegseth’s plan to livestream Hasan’s execution was initially supported by Trump. But on Thursday, following widespread outcry that spanned the globe, the president announced on Truth Social that he was calling off the broadcast. Still, he still half-supported the aborted snuff film, saying that it “might have been a strong deterrent for the World to witness how America deals with Terrorists and SCUM.”

Trump’s supporters didn’t need to wonder if he was drawing a line at broadcasting a grisly death. Earlier this week, the president shared footage featuring the last moments of a man who was killed by a tiger in a U.K. zoo. He followed that up with an AI-generated video that struck a celebratory tone, showing Trump chasing away a tiger while remaining unharmed. 

On the other side of a computer screen, his MAGA base must have been laughing along.

The post MAGA just wants to watch people die appeared first on Salon.com.

A vulgar spectacle uses gilt and grandeur to cover for a weak mind. There’s a bit of treacle for a devoted audience, all flash, no substance. Yet despite it all, it’s an undeniable force with a string of victories proving that Americans have horrible taste.

You could be forgiven for thinking, given the context of the last decade, that I’m talking about President Donald Trump. But those are the sentiments that greeted Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “The Phantom of the Opera” when the musical crossed the pond from London’s West End in the late 1980s. Time reviewer William A. Henry III called it “muddled” and “slushily derivative.” Still, he couldn’t doubt that it bowled over a certain type of theatergoer.

“For those who seek an equivalent to a ride through the Haunted Mansion at Walt Disney World — seemingly a vast proportion of today’s Broadway audience — ‘Phantom’ is a brilliantly manipulated journey, scary yet ultimately unthreatening,” he wrote.

Trump was in that number, clapping along with the theme park-ride of a musical. The real estate scion had himself made a jump — across the East River — in the ‘80s. As the crow flies, his commute from Queens was shorter than Phantom’s, but it was about as far metaphorically. Trump’s Manhattan offensive took the family business of his slumlord father into the old-money center of the universe. His penchant for ostentatious displays of wealth and slapping his name up in massive gilded letters did little to win him friends among New York’s elite. 

As he explained in his bestseller “The Art of the Deal,” Trump had always wanted to be in Manhattan. “I believed, perhaps to an irrational degree, that Manhattan was always going to be the best place to live — the center of the world,” he wrote. If he rubbed elbows with members of high society in Broadway box seats and swanky steakhouses, they inevitably came away feeling they were touched the wrong way. As the 1990s dawned, Trump would tell any reporter within earshot that New York society was “horses**t.”

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“I’ll never have the goodwill of the establishment, the tastemakers of New York,” he told Vanity Fair in 1990. “The real public has always liked Donald Trump. The real public feels that Donald Trump is going through Trump-bashing.”

Trump has been open about his love of “Phantom” — though he admitted in his 2004 book “Think Like A Billionaire” to liking “Evita” best out of all Webber’s productions — and he’d shouted out the musical multiple times in interviews. In a 2023 chat with far-right podcaster Steve Bannon, Trump explained his reaction upon seeing the play for the first time: “This thing is unbelievable. It didn’t take long, because the music was incredible . . . The whole thing with the gondolas and the candles . . . it’s great, everybody loves it.” 

Even if Trump hadn’t blasted “Music of the Night” from his newly installed speakers in the White House Rose Garden as pressure to release the Epstein files mounted, and even if he hadn’t used his Kennedy Center sway to honor Michael Crawford, who originated the musical’s title role, it’s hard not to imagine that the president sees a bit of himself in the titular Phantom.

Watching this outsider derail the lives of a stuffy opera society that would never accept him, you have to wonder what Trump was cheering for. Was it Webber’s melodramatic love story, which the show brings to life with all the subtlety of a chandelier crashing to the stage? Was it the cheesy stab of synthesizers and Meat Loaf-style vocals, a stick-in-the-eye for Broadway purists? Or was it the Phantom himself, a man so consumed with the need for recognition that he’d drag all of high society into hell if he couldn’t get it?

The Phantom is a disfigured man who lives beneath a Parisian opera house, furiously writing a discordant opera about the legendary lover Don Juan. He haunts the opera house, eventually fixating on a chorus girl named Christine. He convinces her that he is an “angel of music,” taking advantage of a childhood story told to her by her late father, and he blackmails the opera’s ownership into making Christine a star, while also pining for her. When he realizes Christine is engaged to an aristocrat, the enraged Phantom kills several of the opera company’s members. After forcing the opera house to stage his composition, he kidnaps Christine and tries to force her to marry him. Only after she convinces him that he’s worthy of love does he let Christine and her fiancé go.   

The musical closed in April 2023 after an historic 35-year run, which means that the chandelier no longer falls inside a Broadway theater. But the Phantom of the Opera is still here — in Trump’s mind. Despite winning two presidential elections, he has never received the adoration he feels is due. In public speeches, Trump moans about a press and a public that refuse to give him credit for all the good he’s done. He claims the media never gave him his flowers over his response to the Covid-19 pandemic, that no one celebrates his donation of his presidential salary to federal agencies, that journalists focus too much on the wars he’s started and not the conflicts he’s avoided. 

When the public had the chance to show him love in the 2020 presidential election, they soundly rejected him. It’s a slight he still hasn’t recovered from, and he’s used every opportunity in his second term to settle petty scores and destroy anything that scans like the tastes of elites. You can see Trump’s scorn for the snobs best in his assault on the Kennedy Center, a living memorial to the 35th president that hosted philharmonics and operas — until Trump got his lasso around its neck. Unable to extort the institution into something suitable for his tastes, he’s now shuttered the building and is reportedly weighing its demolition. In his destructive tirades and ongoing dismantlings, all payback for long-held petty grudges, you can almost see a younger Trump watching the heartbroken Phantom. 

The masked outsider lurks on the rooftop, having discovered Christine is engaged. The lines of her duet with her fiancé still ring in his ears: “Love me. That’s all I ask of you.”  

The post Trump’s 40-year love affair with “The Phantom of the Opera” appeared first on Salon.com.

Do me a favor: Picture Charles Bronson. Black moptop over a face lined like a well-traveled map, and a jacket with the collar turned up against the perennial winter of cinematic 1970s New York City. His hand’s in the coat pocket, resting on the only argument anyone he encounters will listen to. He turns to the camera and gives a rapid-fire lecture on the declining birth rates of white Americans and the need to read classical philosophers and reject post-modern thought. 

Ridiculous, right? Bronson’s aggrieved architect in the classic “Death Wish” films didn’t have a guiding philosophy. All he had was a gun and the bad luck to run into nearly every petty criminal on the island of Manhattan, and he sure wasn’t trying to convince the audience of the correctness of his conservative worldview. He wasn’t a debate club member. He was a hammer meeting a nail, traveling to the run down parts of towns all over America to shore things up — to entertain rather than win over audiences. If moviegoers came away thinking that cities were hellholes full of criminals who need to be tried by 12 or carried by six, so much the better.

It’s a lesson that the team of writers, directors and producers at The Daily Wire failed to learn. The film studio arm of the conservative commentary empire created in 2015 by Ben Shapiro and Jeremy Boreing, who left the company in 2025, is pushing out films that double as lectures on how America went wrong by going woke. The latest offering, a campus action film titled “Run Hide Fight: Infidels,” delivers on the hectoring and little else.

From its first original film in 2016, the studio made clear its political orientation — and intentions. “Shut In” features a protagonist, who was a recovering addict and single mother, fighting off a home invasion from a crazed pedophile, and it heavily implies that her former drug use is to blame for the current trouble. She escapes her fate by forcing her ex-boyfriend to overdose and lives happily ever after as an apple-butter-making tradwife. The Daily Wire kept the hits coming in 2020 by making director-writer Kyle Rankin’s “Run Hide Fight,” a paper-thin good-guy-with-a-gun parable that follows a 17-year-old girl whose school is under attack from a squadron of active shooters. (The title comes from a common safety protocol for everyday citizens who find themselves being shot at.) Two years later, Daily Wire commentator Matt Walsh fronted “What Is a Woman?”, a street harassment documentary centered on attacking non-traditional gender identities and transgender issues.

“Infidels,” though, sees the studio outdoing itself in centering  reactionary politics. Starring disgraced Marvel star Jonathan Majors, the film takes the school-shooting premise and injects it into the campus culture wars. Under the guise of pro-Palestinian protests, terrorists take over a small liberal arts college, and a group of college students, with the help of  Majors’ “protect Western civilization”-spouting veteran, fight to take back their campus. 

“Infidels” spouts arguments familiar to any Daily Wire watcher at a blistering pace. College students are either misinformed about the reality of Israel’s war on Gaza, or they are completely oblivious to it. The campus protest organizer, a literal blue-haired college student in a keffiyeh, is unwittingly working for a splinter cell of murderous terrorists. In contrast to the actual police crackdown on campus protests across the country, the college’s trustees and president sit on their hands for fear of causing offense. The town’s mayor refuses to call in the SWAT team because of bad optics. Graffiti primes right-wing watchers to fume with a laundry list of leftist slogans. Land acknowledgements statements, agnosticism, the utility of college education and mixed-race families in commercials all get a moment in the over-stuffed script by Kyle Rankin.

If hearing the arguments of Shapiro, who acts as a producer, in the mouths of supposed twentysomethings doesn’t give the game away, the baffling characterizations in the film do. The students’ tastes veer almost embarrassingly close to those of suburban middle-aged men. They drink (unaged) whiskey that one student distills in his dorm room while listening to ‘90s butt-rockers Seven Mary Three. One character is introduced swinging a sword in his pajamas while chomping a cigar and quoting Rudyard Kipling. If you have been unfortunate to see a Daily Wire hang session, then you will know  that Shapiro and Company aren’t setting up a spate of undergraduate methanol blindness. They genuinely think these kids are cool. 

Focusing on the cast of college kids uncovers the core problem of the film. You’re meant to root against villains who, outside of their devotion to a radical strain of Islam, believe everything The Daily Wire’s average opinionator believes. For the logic of this siege thriller to make any sense, you have to want those college kids, who spend the first hour taking over quads and discussing polyamory, to get away unscathed. Rankin clearly doesn’t; he luxuriates in the deaths of the blue-haired activist and her gay right-hand man. The former has her throat slit in a startlingly graphic manner, and the latter is thrown from a roof in a literal interpretation of a common counterargument against LGBTQ+ supporters of Palestine. The shot of the student falling from a roof to his death is drawn out and examined from several gleeful angles. 

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On the opposite side, the audience is meant to root for Majors’ character, who warns that Islam is coming for “the wombs of our women” and that the U.S. will be undermined by a strict devotion to the rights of citizens. That sword-swinging cigar chomper calls a dying Egyptian dorm neighbor a common ethnic epithet before rushing off to save the day, which in turn serves to highlight a larger issue that The Daily Wire runs into each time they sit down to hammer out a script. When they try to sneak their liberal bogeymen into a film, their debate team muscles kick in. Soon, the film is more “well, actually” than action.

In a vacuum, Bronson’s “Death Wish” vigilante was just as unlikeable. For four films, the actor played a grief-crazed man looking for trouble and shooting anyone who looked at him crossways. But Bronson wasn’t one for speechifying; he never turned to the camera and explained how the big-city carnage was all Jimmy Carter’s fault. He certainly never decided that his late wife, who had been killed by gang members, deserved her fate because of his household’s liberal views at the series’ outset. In the hands of The Daily Wire’s would-be auteurs, the criminals would have spent the opening hour of “Death Wish” hopping subway turnstiles and taking free classes at City University of New York.

The problem of unlikeable heroes is also evident in the leaked script of the studio’s upcoming pro-ICE thriller. With a working title of “Pawn Shop,” the film is set to follow a pair of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents facing down a mob of supposed antifa counterprotestors and members of the gang MS-13 as they attempt to take a suspect into custody. There is even a showdown with a Renee Good stand-in, who is shot by one of the film’s hero agents. From a draft script shared by The Bulwark: 

The first shot takes the [sic] Melanie in the neck, below her covid mask. The second in the head, above her covid mask.

The inclusion of the mask might make The Daily Wire’s supposedly small-government audience feel less sympathy for an unarmed woman who was killed. But asking audiences who haven’t already bought into Shapiro’s schtick to root for her killer across the next few hours of action and culture war arguments is a heavy load no Daily Wire film has shown they can lift. 

UPDATE: This column has been updated to clarify the departure of Daily Wire co-founder Jeremy Boreing from the company in 2025.

The post The Daily Wire is too mad to make a movie appeared first on Salon.com.

With all apologies to David Lynch, in “That Thing You Do!” the film isn’t the thing.

Tom Hanks’ directorial debut, which was released to critical praise but was a box office disappointment, doesn’t hinge on the charming, passable performances of its lead actors. It doesn’t get by on its script, which tells the story of an out-of-nowhere rock ‘n roll band and their earworm of a hit song. Written by Hanks, the screenplay is so thin that the star lists out the stock types of each character in the third act. It definitely doesn’t get by on studio glitz; even if the production team did a bang-up job of recreating the early 1960s, they can’t get around the fact that much of this movie is set in a dreary Erie, Pennsylvania. Whether “That Thing You Do!” works for audiences — and the cozy, quick story of a flash-in-the-pan band has resonated with a ton of people since its release in 1996 — depends entirely on if the title song lands. 

Credit for that has to go to Adam Schlesinger, the late pop-rocker and bassist for Fountains of Wayne who wrote the track with nothing more than the film’s title and a few hints at the story. He needed to recreate the sound of the thousands of teenagers who had their heads rearranged by The Beatles and immediately ran to their garages to pick up guitars — and he nailed the teenybopper perfectionism of early Lennon-McCartney joints. The song’s backbeat is crisp. The bassline struts. The emotions are big, dumb and messy, but no one told that to the harmonies. Even the brief imitation of Lennon’s “losing control” scream is laser-precise, meant to boost the song’s momentum and carry it through a cheery and lazy surf solo. Give it a listen; it sounds like it was written by committee and by four bored teens in equal measure. It’s lightning. 

“That Thing You Do!” had to be that good, because no fictional rock band has ever leaned harder on their hit. The film follows the whirlwind, two-month career of The Wonders, a group so replacement-level that we first meet them arguing over “The” band names that are already taken. Drummer Guy Patterson (Tom Everett Scott) is the star of the film but the bassist joining him in the rhythm section, played in the film by Ethan Embry, doesn’t even have a name. (He’s listed as T.B. Player in the credits.) With lead singer Jimmy Mattingly III (Johnathon Schaech) and guitarist Lenny Haise (Steve Zahn) out in front, they go from local sensation to Billboard chart-toppers in weeks and implode just as spectacularly. Across that timespan, the audience is treated to “That Thing You Do!” in part or in full eight times, once every 13 minutes. Whether that’s the result of a threadbare script or just Hanks knowing what he had is up to the viewer to decide. What’s certain is that “Thing” never gets old.

Unlike The Wonders, Schlesinger’s ability to write a world-beating earworm was no fluke. He pulled off that trick multiple times. Just give a listen to “Pretend to Be Nice” from 2001’s “Josie and the Pussycats.” He’s the pen behind 2005’s “Just the Girl” by the Click Five, which laid a mall-emo whine and reverb-heavy drums over The Wonders’ tried and true formula. If you’ve heard of Schlesinger at all — and aren’t a power-pop geek or a “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” superfan — it was likely through his band Fountains of Wayne and their 2003 hit “Stacy’s Mom.” Though that’s not his band’s best — that honor goes to “Radiation Vibe” or “All Kinds of Time” depending on the mood — it’s more proof that Schlesinger had a direct line to the idealized past in his brain. He could channel an undeniable pop hit out of that ether whenever he wanted.  

Talent like his is in short supply in 2026, especially after Schlesinger himself passed away in 2020. Watching “That Thing You Do!” climbing the charts throughout the movie is a peek into an alien musical world, one that was both more regional and more monocultural than the one we inhabit today. 

The song starts as a word-of-mouth sensation, filling a local restaurant as more and more teenagers hear about this new band and their soon-to-be hit from their friends. They press vinyl to sell at shows, and it gets into the hands of disc jockeys at ever-larger radio stations with an increasing number of watts behind their broadcasts. A labelman, played with equal parts tenderness and sleaze by Hanks, swoops in to take the boys on a tour of state fairs. When the song outgrows the blue-ribbon crowd, they’re flown to Los Angeles for one nationally televised performance before falling out in a bit of dressing room melodrama. 

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The Wonders’ origins and skyrocketing fame built by the ability to press a record locally and impress radio programmers who curated their playlists by hand, are practically a fantasy in the consolidated media landscape of today. The idea of one song taking hold among the entire nation’s teenagers is even more ridiculous now that streaming has fractured the musical monoculture. Global connection came with a kind of dispersion, diluting shared connections closer to home while allowing for worldwide discovery.

For proof, just look at the (Wonder-less) Billboard charts today. Ella Langley’s “Choosin’ Texas” just broke the record for most weeks at No. 1 on the Hot 100. Meanwhile, the chorus of people who claim to have never heard the song grows louder every single day. The debate whether this is a mark of country music classism rages in the pages of the Rolling Stone, itself a bit of a relic from those more culturally unified days. 

“That Thing You Do!” hides its nugget of pop music consensus inside another bygone bit of shared culture: the afternoon cable movie. These easy lifts don’t ask you to think too much. They get in and out in under two hours, often starting as minor hits that become part of the cultural fabric through repetition; they’re on in the background and there when you need them. Films like “That Thing You Do!” are neither notable nor offensive to the typical viewer, and they never make you wonder “Who is this for?” If that question was ever asked, the answer is simple. It’s delivered in three-part harmony in the opening seconds of The Wonder’s lone pseudo-hit, gorgeous and unmissable. 

Who wants to listen to this Beatles pastiche, dreamed up to get Tom Hanks’ film studio off the ground? You.

The post At 30, “That Thing You Do!” is the perfect fake one-hit wonder appeared first on Salon.com.

Few things are more difficult to get down in immutable ink than the history of professional wrestling.

Born on the carnival circuit, the pseudo-sport maintained a here today-gone tomorrow feeling until relatively recently. Promoters scraped out regional fiefdoms where transient performers would fight for a spell before jumping ship in search of better deals. Sometimes they took their name with them; other times they molded themselves to whatever gimmick their new promoter needed on the roster. It makes a mess of any timeline, and that’s before you get to the kayfabe — the illusion — of it all, the fact that all these real men and women are deadly serious about keeping up their fake characters. 

Grasping for concrete facts can leave you with two immutable bits of data: when a wrestler was born and when they died, with everything in between being a show on some level. Get enough of those dates together, and it’s hard not to notice a pattern: These sideshow athletes don’t live very long. 

Gorgeous George, one of the most famous faces of wrestling’s Golden Age, didn’t make it to his 50th birthday. “Macho Man” Randy Savage and his ex-wife/manager Miss Elizabeth both died before reaching Social Security eligibility. High-flying technical wrestler Eddie Guerrero died at 38. Windham Rotunda, who freaked out the WWE for years as a swamp-dwelling cultist named Bray Wyatt, passed away at the age of 36. And earlier this week, All Elite Wrestling star Pac died in the parking lot of an Illinois chain restaurant, just a day after his most recent match. HIs cause of death is still unknown. 

Born Benjamin Satterley in a blue-collar community in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, he first came to national attention stateside in the WWE, where he wrestled under the decidedly English name Neville. He took the cruiserweight title twice before jumping for AEW in 2018. His star rose exponentially as a regular heel for the young promotion. At the time of his passing, he was only 40 years old.

Playing a fake brute who’s willing to take a folding chair to the face to settle a disagreement is hell on a body. Learning how to fall and pretending you have superpowers can’t cancel out physics. If a 240-pound man turns you upside down and drives your head into a padded floor, you’re going to feel it the next day (and probably several days after). The wear and tear is cumulative, adding up over time like it does for all contact sports. Just take a boxer’s blown-out ears and a running back’s trick knee and expand it to account for the fact that, in wrestling, shots to the back of the skull are frequently necessary to move the story along. Recruiting almost exclusively among the huge and jacked — it’s easier to appear larger-than-life on camera if you’re real-world large — makes the list of heart conditions start to pile up. It’s all a recipe for a brief career, and a correspondingly short life.

The situation is exacerbated by wrestling’s employer-employee relationship. Staying true to its seasonal carny roots, almost all professional wrestlers are gig workers. The average star of WWE or AEW signs on as an independent contractor, meaning they are responsible for their own health insurance and are subject to being fired for nearly any cause. The situation has been even worse for wrestling’s women, who spent decades subject to the whims of Mary Lillian Ellison, better known as The Fabulous Moolah, a wrestler-promoter-extortionist who controlled virtually all of women’s wrestling, loaning out talent to regional promotions and taking cuts of stars’ pay.

Unlike the four major professional sports in the U.S., wrestlers have no pension and no retiree health benefits. If you wrestle for a living, you’re faced with significant pressure to perform for as long as you can, through as many injuries as you can. Unsurprisingly, the list of premature wrestler deaths is heavy on accidental painkiller overdoses and acute toxicity from mixing medications with alcohol. 

The central role of the promoter — and the lack of genuine athletic competition in matches — puts wrestlers and management on remarkably unequal footing. It’s hard to cause trouble for a boss who can simply write rabble-rousers out of the scripted action. Attempts to unionize the talent were mounted in the 1980s, first by hoo-rah heel Sgt. Slaughter, and then by wrestler-turned-governor Jesse “The Body” Ventura. The latter seemingly bought into some of the era’s storylines and ringside magic, believing that a rousing speech to the wrestlers in the locker room would convince them to strike. But he was ratted on by company star Hulk Hogan, and promoter Vince McMahon quickly summoned Ventura to let him know that any future outbursts of class consciousness would come with walking papers. 

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“Vince . . .  basically threatened to fire me if I ever brought it up again and read me the riot act,” Ventura explained on The Steve Austin Show. ”I then did WrestleMania 2 and immediately left and did ‘Predator’ and was a member of the Screen Actors Guild now, my union that I get retirement from now, healthcare from, all of that from.”

The situation only got worse as WWE muscled out nearly all regional promotions. McMahon’s anti-union behemoth spent decades as the only game in town for professional wrestlers who wanted the reach of a televised promotion. In recent years, AEW has pitched itself as an antidote to the WWE, but its roster is also almost entirely composed of independent contractors. Stars like CM Punk and Ray Fenix have complained loudly about the way the promotion handles wrestler health.

Pac is the second wrestler who performed in an AEW ring to have died just this month. Andy Williams, the former guitarist for metal-core act Every Time I Die who wrestled under the name “The Butcher,” died after collapsing during a match with an independent, regional promotion on Sept. 5 at 48. (His contact with AEW expired in April, after which he became a free agent.) Williams’ official cause of death is pending, awaiting final autopsy results.

Wrestling’s treatment of its employees is a bit too abstract to be listed on either man’s autopsy report. Coroners are in the business of endings, putting a neat period on decades of damage with phrases like “cardiac arrest.” Still, anyone who has followed wrestling for years can see the way it hobbles its heels and heroes alike. In a sport that heavily encourages everyone watching to follow the narrative, it’s hard not to notice a pattern.

The post AEW wrestler Pac’s death exposes pro wrestling’s labor problem appeared first on Salon.com.

Before it became reality, the biggest fear around a second Donald Trump administration was an increased level of competence. The candidate and his team displayed shocking measures of discipline and consistent messaging throughout the 2024 race, with much of the credit going to campaign manager Susie Wiles, who became his White House chief of staff. As a result, some feared that the shambling jankiness of his first term would be replaced by an efficient, experienced administration that would carry out a ruthless, quasi-fascist platform with few hiccups. 

That hasn’t happened. Once in office, Trump replaced the GOP’s establishment scolds who curtailed his worst impulses in his first term with loyalists who were just as green as him. The result has been constant outrage over blatant graft and executive overreach, as Trump is unable to stop blabbing about his — possibly illegal — dealmaking and unconstitutional policy goals. But look to the Republican Party’s backbenchers: You’ll see what MAGA could do with a figurehead who can keep their trap shut. 

A loyal Trump acolyte, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry has happily deployed bored-looking National Guard troops to New Orleans and the U.S.-Mexico border for little more reason than pleasing the president. He has successfully pushed a law to require the display of the Ten Commandments in schools, and he rarely shies away from red meat conflicts with his state’s few Democratic strongholds. Little surprise, then, that Landry was hailed as MAGA’s next-generation hero by Rolling Stone in 2024.

But when the time comes to pass Republican policies he truly cares about, or to hand out contracts and favors to his preferred businesses, Landry goes eerily quiet. Unlike Trump’s premature crowing over his massive ballroom or countless would-be Iran ceasefires, the governor has a tendency to let his work speak for itself. 

When it was published, Landry’s profile in Rolling Stone made hay out of his ability to go dark. Lately, though, when he gets quiet, it’s out of legal necessity. His administration has proven remarkably open to signing non-disclosure agreements while working out public deals with megacorporations.

According to a report from the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the Landry administration has signed nearly 300 NDAs since he took office in 2024. The Gulf States Newsroom uncovered a further 100 NDAs between the governor’s office and its employees, restricting what they can share about their time on the job. Reporter Drew Hawkins, who spoke to employees of former Louisiana gubernatorial administrations, said the broad gag orders on public employees was unprecedented.

“[T]hey’ve never seen anything like this,” Hawkins told New Orleans television station WWL. “They don’t know about anybody else signing them. They never signed them, and then you know one of them reviewed it and went through it point by point and talked about just how wild this would be to enforce.”

The result of all these hush-hush agreements is most noticeable in recent headline deals with SpaceX and Meta. The former was given the OK to build a massive spaceport in coastal Louisiana in between two wildlife refuges. While the under-wraps deal was being worked out, Landry signed laws exempting aerospace operations from property taxes, nuisance liabilities and public records requests. The final deal, approved in a public meeting of a new development board announced just 24 hours before, granted SpaceX more than $24 billion in tax breaks to build a rocket-launching facility no locals had even heard about.

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A similarly tight-lipped dealmaking process led to Meta’s announcement of its largest data center to date in rural Northeast Louisiana. The project, dubbed Hyperion, will cover six square miles of Richland Parish. The tax breaks granted to Meta, again without public input, total more than $3 billion.

For his part, Landry kept quiet about the agreements until the last possible moment. But once the ink was dry, he was downright boastful about them. “I have no problem letting the people in the state of Louisiana decide whether what we put together was worth it,” he said, telling the Times-Picayune that he was motivated by pragmatism and a desire to drag his economically underperforming state into the future. “You don’t do these deals in the public,. At some point, you have to give the people elected to lead this state the opportunity to lead.”

Since Louisiana’s have a habit of ending up in prison, some level of backroom chicanery is to be expected in the Bayou State. At the moment, Landry’s NDA-heavy approach is largely a Louisiana phenomenon. But the ethically dubious practice of burying public-private deals under NDAs could be put to use elsewhere. 

Landry’s down-low dealmaking offers a blueprint for post-Trump Republicans looking to push through potentially unpopular agreements and policies, including those involving data centers and artificial intelligence. While the president may no longer be able to harness the support he enjoyed by virtue of being loud-mouthed himself, his followers can work quietly to carry on his project under a blanket of keep-quiet agreements — springing them on the public when the deals have already been made.

The post We’ll never know the art of Jeff Landry’s Meta, SpaceX deals appeared first on Salon.com.

Despite everything, I sometimes find it hard not to sympathize with Donald Trump. 

Like Trump, I also chose to make the site of a future climate catastrophe my permanent home. Like Trump, I live in a home more than a century old and spend each day disgusted with the handiwork of the previous inhabitants. Like Trump, I’m fighting a losing battle against decay.

I can’t get too mad when Trump smoothes out the columns of the White House or paves over the Rose Garden when I look at my closet shelves shoved through  drywall or my mirrors held in place with blue-tack putty. When I see the sloppily applied makeup on his hands or the AI edits that transform his doughy octogenarian body into a superhero physique, I try not to think about the cobwebs of spliced knob-and-tube wiring in my attic that became outmoded around the time of Thomas Edison’s death.    

Trump’s poll numbers are in free fall, presaging a brutal midterm election that might make him a premature lame duck. The Big Lie of 2020 has gone stale. His promise to keep America out of new wars has fallen apart in the dumbest and most expensive way imaginable. His foundation is cracking, with at least some longtime MAGA boosters turning on him. His public rambling and late-night Truth Social screeds suggest there may be termites in the rafters. Overwhelmed with the sheer amount of work he’d have to do to actually set things right, Trump has opted for a fresh coat of paint.

The president launched Trump TV on YouTube earlier this week, and once again I can see the logic. The 24-hour propaganda stream allows him to crow about his accomplishments while avoiding the pesky questions that even sympathetic news networks have started tossing at him lately. At a moment when former supporters are visibly backing away from Trump’s moldy message and trying to seal themselves off from the toxic reputational effects of his second term, Trump is creating a safe space for his lead-poisoned die-hards. It’s almost an act of love, or about as close as someone as self-obsessed as the president can get. 

There’s no tension on Trump TV and precious little in the way of explanation. The streaming channel acts as a firehose of Trump news, meant to be met with unquestioning applause from the most devoted members of Trump’s shrinking and increasingly elderly  base. It’s an endless stream of nothing, meant to fill time more than entertain, like the brainrotted AI slop that pollutes TikTok streams, except many leagues less interesting. The lack of conflict that might have been created on a conventional news channel renders his impromptu network interminably boring. 

As the Bulwark puts it,  the channel has “no purpose.”

“It’s simply Trump’s staff trying to fix a problem Trump created — all in an ad hoc way but while trying to give the misimpression that there’s a plan.” the outlet’s Brendan Hartnett wrote. “It’s political ephemera — the sort of content that arguably isn’t even meant to be watched the first time, let alone replayed later.”

Salon’s Sophia Tesfaye agrees, calling  the self-evident desperation “excruciating”:

When a clown’s only trick is shouting into a live microphone, the absolute worst thing that can happen is for the cameras to simply turn off. It’s clear by this week’s spectacle that Trump cannot survive the possibility that America has finally changed the channel.

Away from his glorified YouTube playlist, a pro-Trump ad aired recently on Fox News, pushing back hard against the nonexistent danger of communism in America. Proudly displaying the probably-illegal fact that it was paid for the U.S. government, the commercial uses a visual language deeply familiar to denizens of the online right. A pulsing mix of photos of Trump looking maximally presidential flies past as slogans flash across the screen. UFC president Dana White crows about Trump’s toughness over phrases like “DEFEND LAW AND ORDER” and “AMERICA WILL NEVER BE A COMMUNIST COUNTRY.”

It’s the stuff of AI conserva-slop and gooner Discord channels. It’s unclear whether the TikTok-y style will land with the older, couch-bound Fox News audience, but the purpose is easy to discern. Like Trump TV, it’s meant to boost confidence in the president among an ever-diminishing group of supporters, to create belief in an alternate reality where the White House isn’t falling down around him. 

Let’s be clear that the rot didn’t start with Trump. He was ushered into office by a pre-existing coalition of racists, the tax-cut-seeking wealthy and millions of Americans who got left behind in the unequal recovery from the Great Financial Crisis.  If the whole experiment hadn’t been decaying in the first place, it never would have embraced a bigoted, silver-spoon game show host. Again, I can sympathize. If my own house weren’t in a state where examining anything too closely costs $200, if there weren’t cracks in the porcelain and popcorn shedding from the ceiling, I’d never have been able to buy it. 

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Like Trump, I’m no expert at the job I’ve been handed. I meet each new crisis with little more than a desire to muddle through, to patch it up well enough that I can forget about it. In that light, it’s easy to forgive Trump TV its shoddiness and his advertisements for their questionable legality. The right way to fix the holes in the floor is kind of abstract, while the screws and plates in my utility closet are right there. Trump can’t fix the core problems of an increasingly unequal America or stop the slide of the country’s global esteem. So, why not slather on another coat of bull and hope no one notices?  

Trump’s term will end soon. He will visibly grow older – pretty fast, I suspect — and then he’ll die. Trumpism just has to hold on until he can sell it off to some other sucker. 

The post Trump TV’s intentional brainrot appeared first on Salon.com.

Elizabeth Warren’s job doesn’t need to be this hard.

The Democratic senator from Massachusetts is leading a cadre of largely left-of-center lawmakers in reviving the Stop Wall Street Looting Act, legislation that would curtail the worst tendencies of private equity firms. These investment firms frequently buy struggling companies in leveraged buyouts, foisting the debt of the purchase back onto the business being bought. The firms downsize staff and sell off parts of the purchased company to create dividends, all while charging the purchased corporation management fees for their trouble. When the companies frequently fail to service all this new debt, they are forced into bankruptcies that allow the private equity ownership group to walk away. 

Warren has been fighting for a while to hold private equity firms responsible for the well-being of the companies they own. In fact, this is her third attempt at pushing the legislation, which she first introduced in 2019. The act would close loopholes that shield these investment companies from the debts of the newspapers, hospitals and department stores they purchase, and would also limit the amount that could be extracted from a private equity-owned company. 

“Private equity takeovers are legal looting that make a handful of Wall Street executives very rich while costing thousands of people their jobs, putting valuable companies out of ­business, and in the case of health care, is literally a matter of life and death,” Warren said in a statement of an earlier version of the bill. 

Facing one of the most money-friendly presidencies in history and Republican control of the White House and Congress, the bill starts to look like a hard sell. Add in the public’s aversion to barring businesses from doing anything, along with the fond feelings many Americans have for the words “private” and “equity,” and it’s easy to feel hopeless. 

But there is a way to shape public opinion on this issue: Warren and her allies in Congress could simply point Americans toward an iconic redhead with pigtails. In recent years, Wendy’s has taken heat for an alleged decline in food quality. The flood of negative reviews of the fast-food chain, coupled with widespread closures of its restaurants, led Slate to ask in April “What the Hell Happened to Wendy’s?”

The logic behind connecting fast food to private equity takeovers is straightforward. Citizens who aren’t likely to notice when their local newspaper becomes a bit more bare-bones, or that the already byzantine healthcare system becomes slightly harder to navigate, will definitely notice when their lunch gets worse — and could well inspire widespread pushback against murky financial operators.

At least that’s what Stavros Halkias believes. The comedian and actor who made his name on an unprintable dirtbag-left-adjacent podcast made the case for tying private equity to bad sandwiches during a recent interview with sports journalist Pablo Torre.

“I think it’s clear that what’s f**king us up is private equity . . . taking over products that are awesome,” he said. “The one that I’ve actually latched onto recently . . . is fast food.”

Halkias pointed to the fast food chain’s recent adoption of shredded lettuce on its chicken sandwiches as a cost-slashing maneuver typical of private equity-owned restaurants.

“Everybody understands that Wendy’s has gotten s**ttier,” he said. “The spicy chicken sandwich now uses shredded lettuce. Right there, that is private equity. That is someone saying ‘We don’t want a fresh head of lettuce that costs more money. So, we’re going to give you bagged sh**ty lettuce. I know in the grand scheme of things it’s not a big deal, but people will notice.”

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Wendy’s is not fully owned by a private equity fund, but Trian Fund Management and its CEO, Nelson Peltz, own nearly a quarter of the chain restaurant’s stock. Peltz has launched multiple bids to take over the chain, most recently in February and August, before deciding he would wait to see if Wendy’s newest CEO, Bob Wright, could turn the flagging operation around. Still, with a buyout looming over the company’s head and its largest investor grumbling, it’s hard to see cost-cutting measures as entirely free from the influence of private equity firms.

Another fast-food chain, Jersey Mike’s, offers a more straightforward example. After the sandwich company was purchased by Blackstone in January 2025, customer complaints about declining quality and rising prices have dogged it ever since. 

“Some f**khead who’s never spread mayo in his life decided instead of a sandwich this is now a commodity,” Halkias said. “By turning the consumer experience shittier, some d**khead who’s never made a sandwich gets a billion extra dollars.”

Halkias sees fast food and professional sports as the two arenas most likely to turn opinion against private equity and investment firms more generally. “I do think if one of these billionaires ruins a franchise, you might have goombah football fans reading Karl Marx,” he said. “If they destroy the Lakers, guys with Kobe back tattoos are going to start the proletariat revolution. I think that the closest we’re getting to class consciousness is fast food and sports teams.”

Halkias gets paid to be funny, and his stand-up career was boosted by a YouTube algorithm that appreciated his talent for crowd work. While Warren and the bill’s co-sponsors shouldn’t lean too hard on an extemporaneous riff from a podcaster, the germ of a promising strategy is there. 

Private equity is abstract by design; the role of these firms is hard to figure for anyone outside of the C-suite. To draw the line between funds with boring names and the everyday services that have been eviscerated by bean-counters, Warren and the supporters of the Stop Wall Street Looting Act will first have to first meet people where they are. And where they are is eating lunch in their cars.

The post The private equity backlash could start at the drive-thru appeared first on Salon.com.

Digital journalism is as subject to fads as any other medium. Snarky fisking — responding to an article line-by-line — gave way to the quiz boom, which was consumed by the personal essay before the long decade of short-form video. But if you squint, you can see the outline of the type of stuff that always works. 

Gossipy reported pieces on scams and relationships, such as the latest news about Donald Trump’s aide Natalie Harp or The Cut’s regular output, are always a safe bet. Fightstarters over ambiguous issues — the annual argument over “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” the internet-breaking Dress, countless poorly written math equations on Facebook — are evergreen. Barring that, it never hurts to channel Helen Lovejoy from “The Simpsons”: You won’t go broke thinking about how we should all think of the children. 

Over the weekend, one such piece tore through the well-meaning liberal corners of the internet — meaning Bluesky and Threads, mostly — and prodded at the gap between educational idealism and the hyper-competitive reality of schooling in America. 

In a column for the New York Times Magazine titled “In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?”, Nikole Hannah-Jones agonizes over her decision to walk the walk with regard to her belief in robust, well-funded public schools for all children. The journalist made the decision to send her child to a Brooklyn public school whose student body was predominantly Black and impoverished, believing that her well-resourced family could help push for better education for all the city’s children from within. She wrestled with the struggles her daughter faced while trying to get ahead and deciding to test into one of New York’s ultra-selective specialized public high schools.

In her column, Hannah-Jones grapples with the ways underfunded schools leave even talented students feeling pre-emptively defeated — a sense that the city’s elite schools are beyond their grasp, even if their own test scores might indicate otherwise. Overworked and burnt-out staff teaching the children of overworked and burnt-out adults isn’t a recipe for educational success, and Hannah-Jones’ recollection of her repeated frustrations and conversations with educators paints a heartbreaking picture of a systemic issue that no one family could reverse. She makes herself sick with guilt over her choices, reaching out to activists and her daughter’s former educators to help her make sense of the problem and her response to it. 

But Hannah-Jones is ultimately unsuccessful. As the principal of her daughter’s struggling middle school puts it, “there’s no model out there for holding all of these truths, these complex truths, all at once.

“We are working within the system that we know is not working, while trying to recreate and reimagine a new system, while working with young people who have all this potential, who’ve not been given the opportunities for that potential to thrive and be unleashed,” the educator says.

In the end, Hannah-Jones’ daughter succeeded against the odds, landing in a great test-in school. But it’s hard to come away from her story believing that such a result would be attainable for others. 

Once the column hit the web, it quickly devolved into a fight over whether wanting the best for your child is a betrayal of egalitarian ideals. Hannah-Jones is a gifted writer, and her piece isn’t as flat as that argument implies. But the dilemma pokes at what has long been a sore spot for well-heeled liberals. Are the exceptions that every parent would make for their child morally permissible? Does sending your child to the best possible schools make believers in a better world for all big, fat hypocrites? 

I’ll let you in on another bit of digital journalism that always holds true: Questions explored in commentaries are either unanswerable or the answer is “no.” We should have well-funded schools for all American children, where success isn’t so tied to where you call home and the relative affluence of your neighbors. We don’t, though and kids only get one shot at raising their children.

Like Hannah-Jones and her husband, I was the product of well-funded public schools. Private school was never an option for my working-class parents, but living close to the vacation homes of wealthy people boosted the quality of public schooling. The coastal county where I was raised is even wealthier and more populous now, but Florida’s rightward turn to school choice, along with a post-COVID crackdown on classroom curriculums that might be deemed “woke,” has left those same public schools poorer and its teachers less free to do their jobs. The state is currently in the midst of a property tax revolt that may further gut local school funding. A rabble-rousing, union-advocating teacher friend of mine came out of the same public schools as me, and she now teaches at a private school, primarily to pay for the discounted tuition her daughter receives.

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I’ll soon have skin in this debate myself. I’m expecting my first child at the end of this year, and if I didn’t live hundreds of miles away from Florida, I would be looking into the academies, charters and parochial schools that serve the county’s booming population of wealthy remote workers trying to pull the ladder up behind them. 

Living in New Orleans, I’m lucky in a way. My child will be born into a city that has no traditional public school system; New Orleans went all-charter in 2019. The scramble to get kids into the best schools is baked in, with parents entering their grade-schoolers into school choice lotteries with little regard to geography, making it unlikely that my child will go to a school that mirrors the demographics of our neighborhood. That decision was made for us years ago. While I believe that public education should be funded at the state level, with equal per-student distributions of tax dollars coming from the top, I won’t be required to back that belief in equality up with action any time soon.

Hannah-Jones’ experiment might be novel, but the fight that broke out around it is familiar. You can see it anytime an outwardly progressive politician or commentator benefits from their personal wealth. If you really believe that America is in the grips of a homelessness crisis, why haven’t you opened your own home to the down-on-their-luck? How can an elected official like Sen. Bernie Sanders push for affordable healthcare for all, while benefitting from the Cadillac health plans afforded to Congress? If you’re such a believer in public schools, why would you balk at sending your child to a failing and underfunded institution?

Such arguments are meant to pare down complicated, systemic issues into a series of individual choices. They may vary on the specifics, but the intent is the same. Critics of progressive policy pushers want activists to shut up about privilege because it makes them uncomfortable. Having to think about the advantages and disadvantages baked into the system strays too far from the preferred framework of school choice advocates and other conservatives — that all people are equally free to choose the life they lead, and that failure to wring a good education out of our flagging system is entirely the fault of the individual.

It’s not a frame that public school advocates, Medicare for All true-believers or affordable housing rabble-rousers need to accept. The gap between progressive beliefs and reality is right there in one of its oldest and most popular bits of sloganeering: Another world is possible. Admitting that it’s not here yet is the first step to fighting for it.

The post Wanting the best school for your kid doesn’t make you a hypocrite appeared first on Salon.com.